Cabinet Secretary Oliver Dowden has urged nurses to accept the 5% pay rise they have been offered in what he has called a ‘decent’ deal.
He acknowledged it would be challenging to find the money needed to fund the improved pay offer for NHS staff, but said they had to end the strikes and accept the offer.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster told Sky News: ‘Finding this money is not easy.
“But we think in this context, to make sure we’re rewarding nurses well and avoiding disruptions, we can find the money to do this, but it’s not going to be easy.”
He suggested the money could come from the £160bn NHS budget or from ‘broader government spending’.
He added: “Given the pressures health services are under around the world, we are not going to move services away from the frontline.
“I don’t deny for a minute your point, which is that finding this money is a challenge.
“This is why the government has waited so long with these negotiations, because there was not a huge amount of money we could turn to.
“But I’m confident we can find it within the NHS budget or wider government spending.”
nurses last week were offered a one-off payment for the current financial year of between £1,655 and £3,789 and a 5% consolidated pay rise.
In an additional commitment to the nurses and ambulance staff, the government has agreed to create a new pay column exclusively for all nursing staff with the intention of taking effect for 2024/25.
The deal agreed upon is a far cry from what nurses had initially demanded at the end of last year.
Nurses walked out in December for the first time in the RCN’s 105-year history because they wanted a 19.2% pay rise to offset massive inflation.
The cabinet previously indicated that it could only pay a wage increase of 3.5% for staff.
Trade unions indicated earlier this year that they would be satisfied with a 10% wage increase.
Unions will have to vote their members before the dispute ends, and will suspend future strikes while that happens.
Despite months of refusal to negotiate current NHS salary levels, Oliver Dowden insisted that ‘we were always willing to work with the unions’.
Mr Dowden told the BBC on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: ‘We had initial talks with them.’
He added: ‘If we want to get into the kind of guts of the two different deals, so to speak, I think my overall dispensation right now is ‘we’ve got a decent deal now, let’s move forward’.
‘But in terms of content, the RCN (Royal College of Nursing) has first of all shifted its position.
“Secondly, the additional amounts we agreed on for this year are supposedly non-consolidated, so that means they don’t really contribute hugely to inflation because they don’t carry over and don’t add that much. pressure on public finances.
“In addition to that, we’ve been looking forward to the year ahead, which we’ve always said we’re willing to do, and the number we have for the year ahead is broadly in line with where we expect broader public or private. sector wages.
So it’s a good deal. And I’m calling on people to support it. ‘
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